Space Game Camera - Conference keynote

Space Game Camera; the perspective interface, the virtual camera and the simulation of I

This is the topic of the Keynote lecture for the Computer Interaction and Games+Entertainment Conferences in Freiburg, Germany in July of this year. And the dude giving this presentation is yours truly… :)

This work comes out of ongoing research I’ve been doing into visual aesthetics connected to screen media that utilises the virtual camera - motion graphics, games and movies. What excites me about this presentation is the context of the audience, a focus on interface experience and control rather than traditional screen-studies connected to film making. The blurb for the presentation goes something like this…

For screen-based media the ‘frame’ is the compositional axis around which an interaction paradigm is assembled. Drawing from ideas embedded in auteur cinema this act of populating the frame is known as Mise en Scene, from the French, meaning to ‘place into the scene’. What is subtly embodied in this model is the pre-defining of the position of the Viewer in their survey of the screen interface; a staging for the user.

Yet, the heart of the contemporary computer gaming interface is the 3D  computer-generated environment - one that, by its nature, largely breaks with many of the traditional ideas of framic composition. A 3D CGI environment is not built on a pre-defined viewing position but, rather, on infinite and variable positions within an holistic space. Such composition is distinctly landscape-architectural rather than framic. Here it is the environment, the world, the space of the interface that is composed by the designer not the ‘frame’. The camera - a vanishing point of perspective - is then immersed into the scene, a staging OF the camera rather than a staging  FOR the camera. What results is an interaction paradigm of User-as-Cinematographer and the compositional process is inverted in its relationship to the frame. The frame is a means for the user to interpret and present the composition to themselves. It is here that the software mechanic of the virtual camera is the foundation of the game interaction interface. The user as Camera-Operator is the bridge between intent and experience; conducted via a simulation of self into a virtual space - the simulation of ‘I’.

This paper will examine the roles of the virtual camera and landscape architecture in the construction of game interfaces and modes of interaction. It will draw upon the overlaps between moving image forms - live-action, animation, motion graphics and gaming - and techno-creative processes to present a functional paradigm for articulating the act of interaction composition in gaming; the Mise en Space.
 

I’ll make an audio recording of the lecture and post it into the podcast section of the site once Im back from Germany.